- JSpell: A free browser-based spelling (and basic English grammar) checker. Also has French, Spanish, Italian and German modes.
- Wordcounter : Quick and dirty way to get an idea of a word count of a piece
- Carnegie-Mellon Sentence Diagrammer
- LanguageTool : Preposition & literature metrics tracker, checks grammar and style in multiple languages
- ASCII Code Table
Search Tools
- Archive.org: Searchable out-of-copyright and public domain text, videos and audio files.
- SciHub : Access academic articles that are usually paywalled.
- Annas Archive: Books and academic papers
- Finding public domain books (the vast majority of those published before 1964)
- Introduction to Searching Public Records
- Tools for bypassing newspaper paywalls (don't always work): Bypass Paywalls / 12ft
- List of web archiving services
- Conifer - Free webpage archiving service
- SearchMySite - Engine that only indexes hobbyist/independent sites
- Teclis - Searches only ad-free web pages
- Oldest Search - Shows the oldest available results
- Million Short - Can be set to automatically remove the top 100 to top 1 million results from search
- Wiby - "Web 1.0" search engine meant to reflect the 90s/early 00s search experience and only indexes similarly simple pages
- Old'aVista - Site for searching existing Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod etc. pages still available on the web
- HigherIntellect - Archive of old text files
- Overview of search engines with their own indexes (see also Wikipedia's list of global search engines)
- FastPeopleSearch - does the sorts of things that Pipl used to do for free
- Reddit OSINT - leads and techniques for people search
- Narkive - Newsgroup archive (alternative to Google)
- ArchiveBot - designed specifically to archive smaller websites
Sources of Royalty-Free Images, Music and Sound
- Pixabay
- Unsplash
- Creative Commons
- Pexels
- Google Advanced Search - filter for Commercial Reuse
- PXHere
- VisualHunt
- GraphicBurger - more design elements than stock photos
- Envato Elements Monthly Free Templates
- Canva
- PicFont - Add text to pictures quickly (see also ImgFlip)
- TPDNE
- Image Background Remover
- PhotoFunia
Sources of royalty-free music
Free Image and Video Tools
- Audacity - Free sound editor (Download version 2.4.2 for the most stable and recent version that does not have user tracking)
- OBS - Free software for basic screencasting / video streaming
- List of screencasting software
- Recommendations on open source video editors
- AVIDemux - Simple and free video editor
- Classic Windows Movie Maker (found in Windows Live Essentials 2012, can be installed without the other stuff in the package, great for quick and simple videos and basic trimming/editing)
Contracts and Invoices
Free Publishing Platforms
- About.me - Free basic one-page websites
- Let's Encrypt - Free SSL certificates for websites
- PeerTube - Alternative to YouTube that is peer-hosted and uncensored
Communications
- FaxZero - Send short faxes over the web for free, around $2 for longer faxes via PayPal
- Chromium - Web browser useful when clients have some janky CMS that only works right in Chrome for some reason, but you don't want to install it and have to worry about what kind of spyware Google is planting in the background. Chromium is open source Chrome with the spyware stuff ripped out.
- Waterfox - Alternative anti-spying version of Firefox
- LibreWolf - A fork of Firefox with privacy enhancements
- Tor Browser - Useful for quickly bypassing region locks without any hassle
- Firefox Focus - Good private browser for mobile (if Brave isn't to your taste for some reason)
- ReactOS - Free open-source Windows emulator
- Oracle PDF Import Extension - Free option for editing PDF files, use with any version of OpenOffice prior to 4.0
- Spreadsheets without MS Office or Excel - Zoho Online Excel Viewer and Google Sheets
- Lumen Privacy Monitor for Android devices
- SimpleLogin - Free email alias service
- Free encrypted cloud storage options
- Free file encryption options
- Safe and private torrent client options
- Assorted translation tools
General Advice & Resources
Tricks for accessing paywalled sites - the classic is to put a "." after the ".com" part of the URL, but a lot of sites are onto this now. Still, if it blocks client side this can still work if you add the ".", refresh the page then quickly hit ESC or the "Stop" button in the browser before it loads in the blocking layer.
Another option is to plug the URL into archive.is, and your local library card can often get you access to these sites if you log into the library website first
Incorporating / Forming an LLC
Issuing A DMCA Takedown
Who Pays Video Game Writers?
Ways to Build Mobile Apps Without Programming
K-Lite Codec Pack - Allows you to play all sorts of video files in Windows
IRS Taxpayer Bill of Rights
Tips for dealing with plagiarism
Social Media
- How To Create Twitter Cards
- Nitter (replace any "x.com" url portion with "nitter.poast.org" to view in browser)
- YouTubeDL - Downloads videos from quite a few of the "tube" sites
Sourcing and Collaboration
Virus Scanning / Protection
VirusTotal - Online scanning
MalwareBytes - Offline scanning
ProtonVPN - Reputable free VPN service (from ProtonMail), will usually slow down your traffic somewhat and can't be used for streaming, but works in a pinch for securing hotel/restaurant wifi etc. connections if you need to do logins on them
UBlock Origin - web browser extensions for blocking tracking and ads
Alternative Operating Systems and Tools
WPD Windows Privacy Dashboard: shuts down unwanted Windows updates and telemetry - Optimization tips
W4RH4WK - A Windows 10 debloater/privacy enhancer
Windows 10 Pro Superlite (buyer beware, not screened for malware)
Pop! OS - Small and simple Linux distribution designed for newcomers to the OS
Simple options for running Linux on an Android device
SD Card / Portable Drive File Recovery Tools
These tools generally cannot recover your original file structure and file names, but will extract the files in their original (and usable) format
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